Lisa Su, President and Chief Executive Officer of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) delivered her 2019 CES keynote. It was not all about AMD’s new GPU and CPU but about pushing the boundaries to enable creators, researchers and inventors to solve the world’s toughest and most interesting challenges.

From bringing a storyteller’s vision to life through digital characters, to helping communities come together through a shared love of gaming, to solving some of our toughest challenges in the realms of education, healthcare, climate change and energy solutions, AMD sees incredible opportunities to apply more powerful computing technologies to solve some of society’s toughest problems.

“This is an incredible time to be in technology as the industry pushes the envelope on high-performance computing to solve the biggest challenges we face together. We made big bets several years ago to accelerate the pace of innovation for high-performance computing. 2019 will be an inflection point for the industry as we bring these new products to market. From our 7nm Radeon graphics chips to our next-generation 7nm AMD Ryzen and AMD EYPC processors, it’s going to be an exciting year for AMD and the industry.”

GadgetGuy will try to de-tech the announcements – let’s just say faster computers using less power, better graphics, and gamers fawning over CPU and GPU offerings. AMD’s website is here

AMD Gaming Graphics Updates

The world’s first 7nm gaming GPU, AMD Radeon VII, for exceptional performance for the latest AAA, esports and Virtual Reality (VR) titles, demanding 3D rendering and video editing applications, and next-generation compute workloads. It has 2x the memory (16GB) and 2.1x the memory bandwidth (1TB/s), up to 29/36% higher gaming/content creation applications (compared to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64). It has high-refresh HDR6 gaming at 1080p, support for ultrawide 1440p and 4K, and 8K monitors.

AMD Radeon VII graphics card is expected to be available beginning February 7, 2019.

AMD Server Updates

The AMD EPYC datacenter processor had a tremendous first year with more than 50 EPYC-based platforms shipping from leading server providers.

Su showed the world’s first 7nm datacenter CPU, codenamed ‘Rome’, also based on the “Zen 2” x86 core. Su demonstration a single pre-production EPYC “Rome” processor to two high-end Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 processors. The single EPYC processor delivered approximately 15% higher performance. The AMD EPYC™ “Rome” processor is on track to start shipping in mid-2019.

2nd Gen AMD Ryzen Mobile processor with Radeon Vega Graphics
deliver the world’s fastest processor for ultrathin laptops. They provide up to
12 hours of general productivity and 10 hours of video playback battery life,
4K HDR video capability and Microsoft Modern PC features. A record number of
AMD Ryzen-based notebooks powered will be available in 2019 from Acer, Asus,
Dell, HP, Huawei, Lenovo and Samsung.

GadgetGuy’s take: Intel has had too little competition for too
long.

While AMD announces
7nm CPU and GPU Intel is still on 14nm with 10nm coming ‘soon’. But then its time to play core-wars (i9 versus
Threadripper) and more.

What is clear is that Dr Lisa Su has turned AMD’s fortunes
around and it seems there is no stopping the company.

AMD Radeon dominates the entry-mid-range gaming PC space and
NVIDIA the upper-end. Intel still has no standalone GPU although it is rumoured
to be working on one for 2020. By the way, NVIDIA high-end GPU sales tanked after the great Bitcoin mining crash of
2018!

GadgetGuy has been impressed with the AMD offerings it has
seen and looks forward to the new power plants
coming soon. Meanwhile, according to DigiTimes,
AMD has reached a 30% share of x86 desktop processors, 5% of mobile and 5% of
servers at the end of Q4, 2018. Its new announcement will give it even more market
share in 2019.

The keynote is below – it is 1:35 hours long. Tune in around 15 minutes.